WPT Malta Day 1a – Toft Is Top

Literally within just a few hours of one World Poker Tour event coming to an end in Paris, we had the Malta World Poker Tour Event starting up. The €3,300 entry tournament only managed 64 players on the first flight of day 1, yet that maybe something to do with most of the worlds live tournament players not having enough time to get here from France.

For that reason we are expecting a much larger amount of players for Day 1b. Of the players today, there were just 34 remaining by the end of Day 1a with the Danish Casper Toft leading the chip counts with 123,600.

A large part of his stack was earned when he eliminated Vladimir Geshkenbein who is the current EPT Snowfest champion. This occurred when Toft held pocket eights versus the 10-9 of his opponent.

Though the attendence was slightly lower than expected due to the reasons we mentioned above, and because of the PokerStars WCOOP currently ongoing online, there were certainly some of the biggest names in poker still taking place. Is there any bigger name in poker than the most decorated player of all time Phil Hellmuth? Unlikely.

Hellmuth made his usual late entry into the tournament by buying into the event on level 6. All of the attention quickly focused on the 12 time WSOP bracelet winner especially when spider man suddenly made an appearance behind him.

The explanation behind this was that last year Hellmuth played in this event and was eliminated by local man Andras Fekete. Hellmuth was bitten during the tournament by a spider and claimed that was the reason he was not playing to his best, because of the discomfort.

This drove Fekete to create a video of himself attacking cardboard cut outs of Hellmuth and then promising to eliminate Hellmuth again this year. Hellmuth’s arch enemy in poker is Tony G, and when he found out about the video he loved it and spoke to Fekete to come up with a plan or two. He decided to buy Fekete into the tournament for a few favours in return.

One such favour was to don a Spiderman outfit and try to make Hellmuth tilt. The main reasoning behind this is that Hellmuth and Tony G have made some prop bets on this event meaning the loser will have to perform some physical challenges.

Hellmuth didn’t seem too fazed though as he made it into Day 2 holding 48,600 chips. He will be joined on Day 2 by players such as Andrea Dato, Ozzy Sheikh, Jonathan Duhamel, Dominik Nitsche and Dan O’Brien.

We are going to be glued to this tournament to see not only who wins, but what else Hellmuth and Tony G will have up their sleeves for each other.